A paper just published in Science has given rise to some astonishing headlines:
Dogs can understand human speech, scientists discover

Dogs process language like us

Dogs understand both words and intonation of human speech
But is the media’s excitement justified, or are they barking up the wrong tree?

Here’s the paper, from Hungarian neuroscientists Atilla Andics and colleagues. It was a canine fMRI study: dogs were trained to lie still in the MRI scanner and were played voice reco